In today's competitive communications market, service providers strive to improve system performance. Although near perfect reliability and extraordinary speeds are goals of service providers, often unplanned and unexpected phenomena degrade system performance. When a customer feels that performance of their communications system is less than average, they often call a service center to request information, determine if there is an outage, or see if there is work in process to solve their problem. Often customer equipment fails, yet the customer will blame the service provider and inquire whether the service provider is having problems.
Communication service providers seek to efficiently address these concerned subscribers. However, service providers often lack the available resources to identify problems that are specific to subscribers. A single subscriber may be provided with physical connections and signal processing from many different providers within a network.